infoTECH Feature

April 13, 2015

How Safe are your Email and Attachments? Can They be Found but not Lost to Bad Guy Actions?

There are two really interesting phenomena at work when it comes to enterprise data.  I hesitate to call them trends since what they really happen to be are business imperatives.  Unfortunately, many times that can seemly contradict each other. 

The first is that IT professionals have as a top priority protecting data. This is data at rest, on the move and even when it is being processed and analyzed.  Indeed, as part of a holistic view to risk management assuring that data is always and all ways secured while it historically been “mission critical’ it has never been as critical. 

Just this past weekend on the most popular TV show in the U.S., Sixty Minutes, there was a segment on the severity of the recent cyberattack on Sony. It was chilling on so many scores. These included the tens of thousands of servers that had to be destroyed, incredible amount of information pilfered, the fact that Sony to gets it hands around the situation literally had to go off the grid, the availability of the means to buy from a minimal sum the tools for almost any reasonably skilled hacker to replicate what the North Koreans did to Sony, the lack of preparedness by most enterprises to deal with this an more sophisticated attacks, and much more. The picture painted by the security experts on the show was grim and forecast to get worse before it gets better.

What was not stated was that when it comes to vectors of vulnerability email is a bright target for the bad guys. As we all know not only is the email itself often used to literally deliver bad news, but the attachments in particular can be lethal. It is why in the wake of so many data breaches attention is being paid to “the weakest links” and email even when encrypted in some manner and scanned remains right at the top of the target list. 

That second phenomena is that because of corporate governance and government mandates, IT must not just store a lot of data for a long time, but make it discoverable, i.e., easily found and accessed with associated tracking for who has seen it, when, where, why and for what purpose. 

As noted this means that these two realities look on their face to be working at cross purposes. One demands a lock-down to the best extent possible/feasible. The other requires transparency, disclosure and access. 

Help is on the way

The good news is the challenges do not have to be at odds with each other.  Using a holistic data-centric approach to security, especially as it relates to the massive volumes of information contained in emails and their attachments, can coexist nice with state-of-the-art eDiscovery.

Interested in learning how?  If you are, register today for the webinar, Protecting Your Enterprise: Keeping Email Secure and eDiscovery Easy, to be held Wednesday April 15, at 1:00PM EDT/10:00AM PDT. You are invited to join Madhu Reddy, Global Product Manager, HP Security Voltage, Michael Osterman, Founder, Osterman Research, and myself as we discuss in detail how to protect enterprise communications with data-centric email encryption, while allowing easy access to the archived secure emails and attachments in the event of legal or audit requests.

This is a unique opportunity to learn about the following: 

  • How to protect your enterprise communications with data-centric email encryption
  • How advances in eDiscovery enable protected emails to be easily accessed and managed
  • Why ease of use, deployment and administration is fundamental to email security success across a global enterprise
  • How email encryption can become a strategic business enabler

It has been said about many things to “let the trend be your friend.”  This is an instance where the trend is finding out about the tools and best practices for keeping you enterprise data secure, while also being able to make it accessible when it needs to be.




Edited by Maurice Nagle
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